Volunteers staffing Boucher Hill fire tower May 14 had vantage point on destruction

“We just couldn’t believe it. Every time we would spot smoke and make a report to the dispatch center, somebody else would say, ‘Hey, there’s more smoke over here, there’s more smoke over there.’ ”

At one time in the United States, there were 8,000 working fire lookouts. They were the first defense against forest fires. Now only 2,000 remain, and less than half of those are actively being used for fire detection.

Boucher Hill is the second lookout on Palomar Mountain to open recently. The first was High Point Lookout about two miles northeast of the Palomar Observatory and four miles as the crow flies northeast of Boucher Hill. It has a great view of the mountains in Riverside and eastern San Diego counties, but not to the south where the county was ablaze.

New technology and communications, the thinking went, had made lookouts obsolete. But there are things the human eye can do that the most advanced cameras can’t.

Wesley Ruise, the district fire management officer for the Cleveland National Forest, said with so many people having cellphones and with the fires that day burning in heavily populated areas, it’s hard to say if the lookout was the first to report any of the fires. But they could have been, he said, and the lookouts are definitely valuable when fires break out in more remote locations.

Waite said in his experience, once a lookout is familiar with an area, “your brain will tell you if there’s something out of the ordinary. I could catch something out of the corner of my eye that would cause me to turn my head and to see what it was and see that first puff of smoke coming up whereas technology wouldn’t do that.”

1:10 p.m. — The tower reports a fire in the San Luis Rey River bed in Oceanside. “At the same time there was a structure fire in Escondido that we called in,” Waite said.

3:40 p.m. — The tower spots a second plume of smoke roughly a tenth of a mile west from the first in San Marcos. “And it took off. It took off in a hurry.”

Officials have confirmed that a small fire behind a house on Washingtonia Drive in the hills between San Marcos and Escondido erupted about that time and then a second fire across a canyon from the first ignited near Cocos Drive, becoming the Cocos fire.

Fitch, a second-year volunteer who was getting a refresher course from Waite that day, said it was a treat watching Waite in action.

“It was amazing to see him work,” Fitch said. “He would spot these fires and get us going on making the reports. He has a great knowledge of the topography of San Diego County, and he could spot exactly where these small fires were starting.”

The lookouts utilize a device called an Osborne Fire Finder — an instrument that has changed little since its invention in 1915.